Brownstein: Broken promise adds to our collective blues

Gleaming smiles and cheery idealism will only carry you so far in this city. About a month or so, it seems, in the case of Montreal’s new Valérie Plante administration.

That didn’t take long for what some believed would be four years of – in the parlance of PM Justin Trudeau – sunny ways.

When it comes down to it, all that matters to most citizens is taxes and snow removal and public transit and traffic gridlock and potholes. But because of a new budget and a whack of bad weather and potholes and gridlock and road construction, the city populace is in a funk.

The backlash from disenchanted voters came quickly. If another election were to be held now, some pundits believe the Denis Coderre team would be swept back into power.

Suddenly, those voters who had been so critical of Coderre’s lack of transparency and perceived arrogance and his out-of-control spending on the city’s 375th birthday bash — particularly with regard to the wasteful Formula E race — are starting to believe they and the media were far too harsh in their treatment of him.

Perhaps. But who’s to say that the Coderre gang wouldn’t have also come out with a budget that would raise taxes for Montreal residents and business owners and, thanks to added agglomeration fees, those of people in the demerged boroughs, too.

We’ll never know. But the angst of our citizenry is more than just higher taxes. It’s about an election promise Plante made and broke — though she doesn’t see it quite that way. Were she simply able to come clean and take ownership of this hike, she might have been cut some slack on the issue. But trying to justify with semantics and curious math just doesn’t do it.

Almost lost in all the tax uproar was this nugget of information, as pointed out in a Letter to the Editor by reader Shane Stephenson on Jan. 19: “Mon­treal is listed at No. 3 in the world af­ter Mex­ico City and Naples in a 2012 sur­vey by the Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nomic Co­op­er­a­tion and De­vel­op­ment as cities that lose most water through leakage.”

“At first blush, it looks like Mayor Valérie Plante has bro­ken an elec­tion prom­ise by rais­ing taxes more than the rate of in­fla­tion,” Stephenson wrote. “Look­ing at the big­ger pic­ture, she is ar­guably us­ing com­mon sense to start fix­ing a huge prob­lem. If noth­ing is done, it will likely, over the long run, cost more to taxpayers than her pro­posed in­crease to help fund water in­fra­struc­ture up­grades.”

Too bad the Plante team didn’t seize on this. Then again, it probably wouldn’t have soothed most frayed nerves.

The tax hike is considerable. Lucky are those, it turns out, whose taxes will go up only 3.1 per cent. It will be considerably more in some city boroughs, and in some of the demerged boroughs it could result in a whopping 10-per-cent hike — because of those agglomeration fees.

Montreal businesses will also be paying heftier taxes. Our hearts have to go out to those whose enterprises have already felt the pinch, thanks to ongoing construction and roadblocks and detours and a lack of much-needed financial support from the city. One really has to feel for those cordoned off, be it on St-Jacques or Bishop Sts. or any other of the myriad troubled spots around town.

As it is now, those living on the South Shore or West Island would have to question their sanity by driving into the city centre on weekends to shop or dine. With the Byzantine traffic configurations around the city, they could probably make it to Ottawa faster — and in a less stressed state.

City councillor Marvin Rotrand has proposed putting a parking tax in suburban shopping malls as a means to keep consumers in the city and to help beleaguered business owners. Don’t think that will ever fly.

But here’s a thought: What about offering free parking on Sundays in the city centre? That couldn’t hurt. Apparently, it is paying dividends in Westmount, which shuts down its meters Sundays.

Of course, in a perfect climate-controlled universe, that’s all swell. But in the polar vortex we call home, there is also the added anxiety of snow-covered streets and sidewalks — some of which are cleaned faster than others.

Hello, Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the city’s most populous borough. Be it because of broken snowblowers or a dearth of dumping grounds, borough residents are understandably irate. As the borough’s newly minted mayor Sue Montgomery so succinctly put it: it has been a “baptism by snow” for her.

Smiles and idealism will never match up well against the snow in this city.

Oh yeah, and we can’t forget: The woes of our fast-sinking NHL club have exacerbated our collective blues. In most years, our shortcomings can often be overlooked when the Habs are riding high. And there’s not even a schadenfreude factor at play on that front now, either, as the cursed Maple Leafs are much closer to hosting a Stanley Cup parade in the next decade than we are.

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